In his latest column, Editor-at-Large Callum McCarthy examines a current digital trend – ‘doing something with influencers’ – and finds that association alone is not enough to boost long-term engagement and reach metrics.

Formula E loves a cumulative statistic. In the 2024-25 season, the electric racing series reported that 561 million ‘cumulative’ viewers watched its product on TV, about 1.4 billion had seen its content on social media, and that it had a global fanbase of 422 million people at season’s end.

Shocking then, given these numbers, that Formula E execs felt that their world-class motorsport product wasn’t enough to attract younger fans. To fix that problem, Formula E went a popular route: doing something with influencers.

Doing something with influencers has become one of sport’s default answers to any kind of demographic or reach problem. Struggling to cut through with the coveted 14-34s? Need to boost your social reach? Six per cent of your free-to-air TV audience died of old age last year? Get the influencers in.

Get them into hospitality, invite them behind the scenes, get them to the training ground or the track doing something wacky with your athletes. Borrow their audience, juice up your views, present it to investors and brands as your audience, and hope that actually comes true.

For ambitious, youth-oriented properties like Formula E, influencer marketing has become a core strategy to grow audience numbers. Instead of inviting some TikTokkers in for some free drinks, Formula E went all the way with an influencer sports contest called the ‘Evo Sessions’, which saw 10 social media influencers (cumulative following: 400 million) drive actual Formula E cars in a fastest-lap competition earlier this year.

In terms of grabbing attention, it did the job. Multiple Evo Sessions videos scored more than a million views and several made it into six figures. However, longer-form content on YouTube, where five-figure views are the norm, a 50-minute documentary film has had only 3,500 views since its publication 12 days ago.

Additionally, there is little evidence thus far that Formula E has managed to convert many of their borrowed audience into full-time Formula E fans, if viewership and impressions across social media platforms in recent months are anything to go by.

In total, Formula E believes 42 per cent of its online video views in 2025 derived from the Evo Sessions, rather than its core product. You can frame that as a highly successful influencer marketing project. You could also say that Formula E rented an audience, added those numbers to its headline statistics, then handed that audience back to the people who lent it.

Was Formula E wrong to try? Absolutely not. But in order to convert a borrowed audience, you need to be selling them your product, not content derived from it.

“There is little evidence thus far that Formula E has managed to convert many of their borrowed audience into full-time Formula E fans, if viewership and impressions across social media platforms in recent months are anything to go by.”

Elsewhere in motorsport, the 24 Hours of Nürburgring has enjoyed a huge boost in popularity thanks to the participation of F1 world champion Max Verstappen. Upon Verstappen’s retirement from the race in the 21st hour, live viewership dropped significantly but remained much higher than for the previous year’s event.

Verstappen wasn’t the only one bringing fresh eyeballs. In 2025, a team of YouTubers brought fresh eyeballs to the race by running the entire Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie, the year-long endurance racing championship built around the 24 Hours. Sim racing and motorsport creators Jimmy Broadbent, Steve Alvarez-Brown and Misha Charoudin have a combined YouTube subscriber base of over four million, all of whom had become fans of the Nürburgring and endurance racing via their content.

Unlike Formula E’s Evo Sessions audience, the trio’s following has stuck with the Nürburgring championship. Why? Two reasons.

First, the audience was introduced to the core product. Second, the YouTubers have stuck with it, too.

Broadbent, Alvarez-Brown and Charoudin also entered this year’s championship and 24-hour race, and are highly likely to do so next year. Their professional and personal ambitions extend beyond making content on YouTube, all three have dreamt of becoming professional racing drivers, and their authentic desire to take part has helped take their audience with them and helped the Nürburgring organisers convert them into actual returning fans.

Verstappen’s return to the race next year largely depends on the F1 calendar, but the hundreds of thousands he brought with him to this year’s race at least got to see the product on offer, albeit only for one day.

It’s a rare influencer success story in sport, but those success stories all have three things in common: significant investment from both sides, full participation, and an influencer who wants to be something more.

When WWE brought in controversial YouTuber and podcaster Logan Paul, many assumed it would be a one-and-done influencer stunt for the promotion’s flagship show, WrestleMania, in 2021. At that time, WWE were borrowing Paul’s audience.

Instead of ending it there, Paul and WWE have forged a marriage made in heaven. Paul has become a fixture on WWE television over the past five years, developing into a highly competent and athletic wrestler, all while drawing on the eight-figure audience that follows his content creation career.

Paul is now 31 years old. He and his audience, mostly built in the early 2010s, are not getting any younger. Both sides of that equation are beginning to age out of his brand of YouTube mischief and he, as much as WWE, was in the market for a new audience. Through both sides committing as much as they have, Paul’s marriage with WWE has been a huge success.

This is, of course, far easier for WWE than it is for actual competitive sports. Elite sport is comprised of people who have spent their entire lives working to be good at one thing; it is incredibly rare that an influencer can be airdropped in without seriously harming the product.

However, in every dressing room, locker room and garage, professional sport has its own loud, brash attention-seekers who spend their lives muzzled by press officers and PR firms. Formula E driver Dan Ticktum is ready-made to be the sport’s ‘man you love to hate’, with a long history of “engaging mouth before brain”, to borrow the words of former Red Bull team boss Christian Horner.

Ticktum continues to dress loud and be loud, but there is a sense that Formula E is reticent to use him as a poster boy for its series, despite his natural ability to drive views and clicks.

“Elite sport is comprised of people who have spent their entire lives working to be good at one thing; it is rare that an influencer can be airdropped in without harming the product.”

Formula E is not the only sports property struggling to harness the power of personality it has among its corps. Rugby union is continually scrambling to appeal to the next generation of fans, all while fans and players cut down every tall poppy that dares to be different.

Henry Pollock, England’s burgeoning star flanker, is a figure of hatred within rugby union circles for his looks, his arrogance and his outspoken nature. It’s no surprise that boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has seen a star in the making, signing Pollock to his Matchroom Talent Agency in a bid to help Pollock’s star rise in spite of rugby’s cultural resistance.

Paul was a ready-made hit for WWE in terms of his personality and abilities, but also his natural ability to make an audience want to see him beaten. Pollock has something very similar. So does Ticktum.

For sports that can’t bring influencers into their top-tier product, learning to love and champion their loudest and brashest participants will be the most effective way of bringing younger audiences through the door. Until then, sport will be borrowing and renting for many years to come.